Computing systems that utilize parallel processing techniques have grown in number and value over the past decade. Additionally, parallel processing has been applied to a growing number of different computing applications. Parallel processing computing systems facilitate the concurrent execution of multiple processes during the same time period. When parallel processing is utilized, a single computational process may be divided into a number of sub-processes, and the computing system may execute the sub-processes contemporaneously, for example using different processing cores and/or different processors. The result from the sub-process computations may then be recombined, resulting in the same output as if the original process had been executed, although the execution of the sub-processes in parallel may take significantly less computing time depending on the number of sub-processes that are utilized. Multi-core processors, multiple processor computers, cluster computing, massively parallel processors (MPPs), and/or computing grids may be examples of parallel processing computing systems.
Additionally, the speed of communication networks has continued to increase exponentially. Gigabit Ethernet (e.g., 1 Gbit/s=1000 Mbit/s) has gradually become the norm and even faster speeds (e.g., Terabit Ethernet−1 Tbit/sec=1000 Gbit/s and faster) are expected to be introduced over the coming years. However, the processing speed of many hardware devices (e.g., the clock speed) has not increased as fast as the speed of the communication networks. Typically, communication packets and other forms of data may be delivered in sequence, making the task of performing parallel processing more difficult, especially when a communicated packet is to be transformed before, during, and/or after communication over a high speed network.